Ethnicity, Economy and Class: Towards the Middle Ground

Abstract

In the past three decades a remarkable shift has occurred, even an inversion, within the sociological agenda. In the 1970s no self-respecting British sociologist could ignore the concept of class: class analysis was a major concern, if not the key concern of British empirical sociology. At this time the sociology of ‘race relations’, as it was characteristically called, was a relatively marginal sociological specialism; and even within that specialism much theoretical work was devoted to the relation between ‘race and class’. As AIi Rattansi’s dissection of the neo-Marxist position in chapter 3 of this volume shows, among Marxists there was a tendency to reduce race to a ‘subset’ of class, even to see it as an obfuscation of ‘real’ class relations; or at the least, to see class as ‘determinant in the last instance’. While the leading neo-Weberian, John Rex, who revisits some of his earlier work in chapter 2, outlined the specificity of a ‘race relations situation’ (Rex 1970), his framing of ‘race relations’ was principally in relation to class contexts and social and political power. The task of breaking free of this modernist preoccupation with class as the central dimension of social differentiation was all the harder because of the strength and sophistication of the classical models of the accounts of class and social divisions offered by Marx and Weber.